What AI Cannot Do
On Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost
There is a question that has followed me through an entire winter of reading. It comes from a pre-Socratic philosopher, surfaced in Solnit’s pages by a student who probably did not know what she was handing over: How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?
It might be the most important question in intellectual life right now and almost no one is asking it.
Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost is not a book that announces its argument. It does not have the decency to proceed in a straight line. It moves the way memory moves — associatively, obliquely, arriving somewhere you did not expect and could not have planned. Essays about early American captivity narratives fold into meditations on the color blue. Desert ecology gives way to Hitchcock. Personal loss opens into philosophy. If you approach it looking for a thesis, you will miss it entirely.
That is, of course, the point.
What Solnit is doing (what the form itself is performing) is a sustained argument for the cognitive and creative necessity of not-knowing. She makes a distinction early in the book that I have not been able to put down since I encountered it. Losing something, she writes, is about the familiar falling away. Getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. These are not the same experience. When you lose something, you know where you are. When you are lost, the world has become larger than your knowledge of it.
Read that again. The world has become larger than your knowledge of it.
